69% of Republicans respond affirmatively. This comports with the general sense that Republicans are getting ready to joyfully snake dance to the polls in November to get rid of the socialist usurpers in Washington and restore the natural order of things. But as Nate Silver has pointed out, the same survey shows 57% of Democrats expressing unusual enthusiasm as well--a higher percentage than ever registered before a midterm by voters in either party, until now.

This election is predicted to have a ~43% turn-out with ~90 million Americans voting. A horrible percentage but that is the way it goes.

What does it mean?

Who knows.

Pre-election political polling, driven by Gallup, is indicating a Democratic disaster. If you accept the polls the Dems will lose the House and Senate, although some pundits, e.g., Charles Cook, are now saying the Dems will keep the Senate. dKos poster Fladem posted, yesterday, a diary claiming Undecided voters are over 14% of Likely Voters ... in which case toss all pre-election seat projections since this block typically goes 75/25 for the incumbent.

Structurally and adducing historic norms, the Dems should keep control of both Houses of Congress.

The barrage of propaganda is all on the GOP side. For example, Gallup constructed their "Likely Voter" screens, the a priori mechanism for determining the actual Likely Voter from one claiming to be a Likely Voter, based on Republicans being 55% of the final vote. I find this Likely Voter prediction highly unlikely but YMMV. Other potential and actual polling "hiccups" to flat-out lying have been discussed ad nauseam in the blog-o-sphere and I feel no urgency to revisit It All.

What does that mean?

It means this election is going to be decided in the precincts, at the polling booths. The side that manages to get their people to the polls is the one that is going to win. I concede that's not a shocking previously unknown bit o' Knowledge ... does have the advantage of being True. ;-)

A safe guess, at this point, is: The Dems will keep the Senate and lose the House. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict the Dems will keep both Houses; I think the structural advantages of the Democratic Party will supply just enough of an ooomph to keep them in charge.

Update [2010-11-2 18:3:27 by ATinNM]:

Early Indications

[Compiled from various Sources]

6:00

Kentucky: (parts of the state close at 7pm ET): Senate, KY-03, KY-06

Indiana (parts of the state close at 7pm ET): Senate, IN-02, IN-3, IN-08, IN-09. Also: control of state House

KY-06 and IN-09 are the ones to watch both of these a Dem held in (so-called) "GOP-Seats." GOP has to take these kinds of seats to win control of the House. So they are early indications of the rest of the night.

Steve Singiser says if KY-03 (Dem) goes GOP the bloodbath is on.

Kentucky Senate is the Tea Bagging whack-a-loon Rand Paul. If he pulls it out it's Not Good for anyone Left of Attila-the-Hun.

A simple, undefined reply when an ignorant comment or action is made. Brought to life in the South Park series, when Mr. Derp made a guest apperance at South Park Elementary as the chef for a day, followed by hitting himself in the head with a hammer and exclaiming "Derp!"

Tonight's election results will produce the usual rush to judgment by pundits and partisans alike. Given the magnitude of the projected GOP gains, the polls probably won't even be closed in any state before at least one person in both of those groups begins to stay that this is the start of a realignment in U.S. politics that will last for generations.Anyone who uses "realignment" tonight, tomorrow, or in the next few months to characterize the 2010 election will either be guessing or spinning.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Off the top of my head, the "guns, god, and gays" goons (see you & raise a "g") correlate closely with the Confederacy and "Keep the Union and Slavery" factions. That last is larger than most people here want to accept.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

You've hit the right frame there. The Tea Party is really just a kinder, gentler Ku Klux Klan, if we're referring to the spontaneous, grassroots, anti-Reconstruction movement that swept progressive Republicans and blacks (there were two black Senators and around twenty congressmen elected right after the Civil War) out of office in the South for almost a century in the 1870's.

I see a slightly different scenario playing out if Republicans gain both Houses. The US economy is going down the tubes anyway whoever is in charge. The Republican majorities will have to take responsibility for the desperate flogging a dead horse. Obama can claim he had the remedies but his hands were tied, and rebound in 2012 - that is if there is a civil society that needs a President.

The resulting histories of the Labour Party Government of 1923 in the UK and the Front Populaire win in France in 1936 doesn't give a lot of hope for the staying power of a vaguely "lefty" government piddling 'round the edges when deep reforms were needed.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

I recall someone here writing, just prior to the 2008 election, something like maybe the Democrats should just sit out the election and let the Republicans have the opportunity to take full credit for the mess they've created. I've always thought that was stellar advice given America's lack of a long term (anything over two weeks) memory.

I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell. _ Blood Sweat & Tears

The Republicans believe that having Wall Street interests controlling who holds office in Washington is the way things ought to be. The Democrats seem to have accepted, starting with Clinton, that that is the way things are and they have to work within that framework.

As a result there is no real opposition party in national politics, only two different flavors of corporatists. I can only hope that, as things get worse and worse due to policies bought and paid for by Wall Street interests, enough people will realize what is happening in time to do something about it. I don't deny it is a long shot.

Last month, the National Bureau of Economic Research's official business cycle-dating committee told the country that the recession had ended in the second quarter of 2009. This was, undoubtedly, the correct call. The economy is showing positive growth, which is what defines the end of a recession.

However, the growth is so weak coming out of this downturn that it will be invisible to anyone who doesn't spend their life looking at economic data. For most people, this will be a recovery marked by continued high unemployment and near-record rates of home foreclosures. And the politicians' response is to cut people's Social Security benefits.

...

The outrageous part of this story is that the pain is completely preventable. We know how to create jobs. It is really simple; we just have to spend money - people work for it. Unfortunately, the fiscal scolds, the people who were too lost to see the largest financial bubble in the history of the world, are telling us that we have to cut our deficits and tighten out belts.

It is probably worth noting that nearly all of the fiscal scolds earn at least six-figure salaries and many earn in the seven figures. So, we have an amazing sight here. People who earn hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars a year, who have the job of designing economic policy, completely failed on the job.

This can't be emphasized enough. Missing the housing bubble was an act of astounding incompetence for an economist. This is driving the school bus into oncoming traffic; it is the kitchen cook burning down the restaurant; it is the computer technician causing a complete freeze of the company's systems.

None of these highly-paid, highly-educated people got fired or even missed a promotion. Instead, they are running around telling people earning $20,000-30,000 a year that they have to tighten their belts and accept lower Social Security benefits.

If politics and the media in the United States were not so corrupt, this would have been topic No.1 in the election. Candidates would have been pushing plans to aggressively stimulate the economy and to throw the Wall Street crowd in jail. But a candidate who said such things would not get enough money to run a serious campaign, because you need to court the Wall Street types to pay for a campaign these days. And the media would have ignored and/or ridiculed such a candidate.

So, we have an election based largely on nonsense. People are rightly angry that their lives are being ruined by disastrous economic policy. But they have no idea where to turn. And the latest data tell us that the situation is likely to get much worse in the year ahead.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

The non-polling of cell-phone only households under-reported a demographic that is 2:1 Democrat. I also point-out a poll that does not meet the "Equal Change" requirement is a poll that is suspect to unreliable.

1994 is the exception that proves the contention. At that time the GOP had the structural advantage and a large whack of Democratic incumbents chose to retire rather than fight the election.

Nate Silver is basing his prediction on meta-polling, call it. IF the individual polls are suspect to unreliable - see #3, above - the same follows-through with his analysis. That said, I hesitated a long time before making my prediction because of the respect I have for Mr. Silver.

Reality Check:

The Dems should maintain control of Congress IFF they vote. One reason, IMNSHO, the GOP and their allies have been pushing GOP Triumphalism is to suppress Dem turn-out.

The more they have been successful inculcating a "We're Gonna Lose Anyway" attitude in the Dem's demographics the larger the number of seats they will ultimately win.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Some of the gerrymandering is natural. In my district the Repubs get single digits in presidential elections. Same goes for the one that starts a few hundred feet away. The next two closest ones the Repubs might make it into the low teens. There are a lot more people living in areas like that than the reverse - rock solid Republican areas still tend to have Dem presidential votes from the twenties to low thirties.

Here is a list of when the polls close across the US. DT, as in EDT, means "Daylight Time." ST, as in EST, means "Standard Time."

Confusing, isn't it? ;-)

Generally speaking, the polls will start closing at minus 6 Greenwich Mean Time and then for the next 3 hours. So I predict by the time California and the other Pacific Coast states start reporting you'll be asleep & I'll be on my (a) second bottle of wine or (b) hitting the brandy ... depending on how things be going.

Useless but Interesting Fact: Indiana (GOP stronghold) suppresses voting by closing early before people with jobs can get there. That's why Indiana always reports with the East Coast.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

I just got back from voting and took my 24 yo son with me. We live in Pennsylvania. The people running that location say they are on track for 55% turnout. It is a usually right wing part of the suburbs of Erie, PA, NW corner of PA.

Sunshine huh? that reminds me of an flashback idea I had back when Ronny Ray Gun got elected the second time. Spend the next 4 years in a sensory deprivation tank consuming various hallucinogens and hoping it would all go away. Since I was not rich enough, the sensory deprivation tank was out.

You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq .

You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us. You didn't get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn't get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.

You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq .

You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn't get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.

You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.

You didn't get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.

You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans drown.

You didn't get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in taxbreaks. You didn't get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.

You didn't get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.

You didn't get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values.

No.....You finally got mad

When a black man was elected President and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.

Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick...Oh, Hell No!!

My next door neighbour has a house in Florida. his daughter lives there and works, and he travels out there a couple of times a year to wander round and play golf. he was saying today that all the people he met in the states are really pissed at illegal immigrants getting free healthcare from their tax money.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Oh, I completely agree. But merely being a Dem is reason enough for the crazy to get amp'd to 11, as we all learned with Clinton.

Although, as I think we'd all agree here, there wouldn't be nearly as much oxygen for the Teabagger fire if Obama & Co hadn't half-assed the stimulus and health care. Hell, just get the stimulus right and you'd be looking at losing maybe two seats in the Senate and ten in the House, because unemployment wouldn't be a concern.

Early Reports Suggest High Turnout In Urban Areas HuPo
posted about 3:00 PM EDT. And how weird is it to still be on Daylight Savings Time in November? I like it! But then I have always been a night person anyway. I used to recommend Daylight Squandering Time, the inverse of DST.

I'm not terribly concerned about the House and Senate. Whether the GOP wins 10 seats or 2 seats, we're going to have gridlock.

The FL-Gov race is the one that interests me. State CFO Alex Sink vs convicted Medicare fraudster Rick Scott. This has the makings of a new all-time-low for Florida politics: A state loaded with more Medicare recipients electing the guy whose company was convicted in the largest Medicare fraud case in history.

That he made it through the primary was mind-blowing. That he might win the general election is too weird for even the Onion to have thought it up.

There are some intense and very under-the-radar efforts to reach infrequent voters, especially people of color, to help win some crucial victories here in California. That may well be part of the reason why turnout is up over 2006.

Another reason is the nature of the gubernatorial contest. In 2006 Arnold Schwarzenegger was cruising to a re-election victory. Here in 2010, the Brown-Whitman battle has been much more closely fought. Brown will win because Latinos have rallied to him in anger at Whitman's attacks on Latinos. And the under-the-radar GOTV efforts will also play a role in turning out perhaps as many as 200,000 voters who would normally have stayed home.

Today is a good day. It's the day the Tea Party died. It matters not how many of their house candidates win. What matters is that if conventional wisdom holds, they have cost the Republicans the Senate.

This loss is all "the white boys" need for an excuse to cut them loose, along with screechy lady Palin. And guess what, Palin knows it, you danged betcha she knows.

Over half of voters named the economy as the country's top problem, with no other issue coming close. Nearly all said the economy is in bad shape and expressed concern about its condition over the next year. Roughly 4 in 10 said their family's financial condition has worsened under President Barack Obama. About 6 in 10 say that overall, the country is heading on the wrong track.

...

Roughly 4 in 10 voters consider themselves supporters of the conservative tea party. About 1 in 4 voters consider their vote a message of support for the tea party and nearly as many said their vote was meant to signal opposition -- but most said the tea party wasn't a factor. Tea party supporters were nearly all extremely negative about Obama and his policies.

...

Given three choices, about 4 in 10 want Congress to focus on reducing the federal deficit while nearly as many prefer spending to create jobs. Tax cuts finished last. Only about 4 in 10 want to continue all of the broad tax cuts that were approved under President George W. Bush, including reductions for people earning at least $250,000 annually. Most of those remaining want to let the cuts expire for the wealthiest earners, while a small number want to let them all expire. Close to half want to repeal the health care overhaul Obama enacted this year, while about the same number want to expand it even further or leave it in place.

Of all the ways of organizing banking, the worst is the one we have today — Mervyn King, 25 October 2010

In other words, 40% of the country is made up of the somewhat sane, 10% is made up of a bunch of mushy dipshits who don't actually believe in anything, and 40% would eat paint if Glenn Beck started hocking it on Fox News.

This election season there's been plenty of talk of about aliens--but not the kind that are the focus of a ballot initiative in Denver, Colorado, where I'm reporting from today. Initiative 300 asks voters a simple question: "Are you ready for the truth?" The only truth the backers of the initiative appear to be seeking, however, is access to information about what the government, military, etc. know about contact between humans and aliens. See, it's not just California that gets the fun ballot initiatives.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

We're still waiting for a bit more data before we release our live forecast updates, but so far, our model has revised its projection to a G.O.P. gain of 55-56 seats rather than 54-55. Not a huge deal, obviously, but it likes what it's seeing from Republicans so far in Indiana, even as most of the other House races so far are playing about to expectations.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Nice in the spring and fall, not too bad in the winter, July and August can be unpleasant, but there is plenty of water. Climate is like LA, WRT temperature, but with regular snow in the winter and heavy humidity in the summer and plenty of rain, but mostly sunny.

He could be a useful front man for the law firms defending against bogus foreclosures. Or Ron Paul could hire him as counsel and have him continue interrogating Ben Bernanke during Bernanke's monthly congressional testimony. Or he could do both. Actually, TWANK's suggestion has merit. He could relocate to California - no shortage of bogus foreclosures there - get residence and run for a district now held by a Republican in 2012, though he might prefer to stay in Florida.

We've got a global financial crises. The US housing sector is exploding. Unemployment is running ~17%. The US is hemorrhaging jobs. The Financial Sector is 40% of all corporate profits. We're in two fucking assed stupid wars. The US infrastructure is falling apart. The average American is bankrupt.

So ...

OBVIOUSLY the first thing to do is start investigating Democrats.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

I actually feel worse about Perriello. That a no-holds barred liberal firebrand goes down in a slightly R leaning district in a midterm with a bad economy, well... (the margin, -16, is a different story) But Perriello, in a similar district, was almost as good on the substance, and by all accounts was an excellent campaigner. If he won, that would provide hope for Dem candidates in such districts who don't want to play the 'moderate' game, but also don't want to be dead folks walking whenever there's an election going the Repub direction. Talking about margins, NH-Sen, open seat, Repub by 24 in what has been a slightly Dem leaning swing state over the past couple cycles. In the MO open race, with a quite popular local politician who is the heir to a powerful local machine, minus fourteen. Ohio, a similar type state, minus eighteen (I knew this was going to be very, very bad night when they called that one the second the polls closed - that generally means double digits). A year and a half ago I was hoping we'd nibble away one or two of those, maybe see one other race tumble our way, see one or two Dems go down and come away with a wash or plus one in the Senate. And Feingold not only lost, but lost to a B-list candidate running as a longtime incumbent in a blue state.

Gerrymandering works when the statistics revert to the historic. Obama won by a massive GOTV effort fueled by enthusiasm. Which they didn't have or do, this time around. So the Congressional districts reverted to the historic.

shrug

If you're not going to fight elections I don't know how you can expect to win.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who lost her state's Republican primary last month to a Tea-Party-backed conservative, announced late Friday that she will run as a write-in candidate in the general election.

...

The senator's unusually worded declaration reflected the startling turn of events in Alaska over the past few weeks. Ms. Murkowski was defeated in the Aug. 24 Republican primary by Joe Miller, a previously unknown lawyer from Fairbanks who benefited from a late surge of support and spending by the Tea Party Express and the endorsement of Sarah Palin. Mr. Miller, who has proposed stark cuts in federal spending, defeated Ms. Murkowski by about 2,000 votes out of about 100,000 cast.

Ms. Murkowski was widely criticized for running a weak campaign and not responding aggressively to Mr. Miller's attacks, some of which distorted her record. She suggested on Friday that the six-week sprint to Election Day would be far different.

This should be interesting. Should she win, would she caucus with the Democrats?

Of all the ways of organizing banking, the worst is the one we have today — Mervyn King, 25 October 2010

Note that they have not looked at the write-in votes yet, only counted how many of them there were. So we've no idea how many were write-in votes for somebody else, and how many misspelled the name so badly that it can't be distinguished from one of the other 100-200 official write-in candidates. (can anyone find the official list of write-ins? I couldn't).

1. The Tea Party is rejected outright by the voters on November 2. A handful of their candidates do win their races; and for the next few years, the Democrats have a grand time pointing out their sheer wingnuttitude, bolstering a compelling case against electing any more of them in the future. The party begins to lose momentum, and in a few years is defunct.

2. The Tea Party elects a credible number of these 70-odd candidates -- enough to make a solid showing and establish its political bona fides, but not enough to get anything serious done. If this happens, progressives need to work fast and hard. If this right-wing tide continues to build as we head into the 2012 election, we'll still be cruising straight into a fascist future -- just not quite yet. There's time to stop it, but the momentum is not on our side -- and stopping it only gets harder with every passing week.

3. A solid majority of the Tea Party candidates win their races, cementing the movement's lock on the GOP and turning it into a genuine political power in this country. They've already promised us that if they take either house of Congress, the next two years will be a lurid nightmare of hearings, trials, impeachments, and character assassinations against progressives. (Which could, in the end, backfire on the GOP as badly as the Clinton impeachment did. We can hope.) Similar scorched-earth harassment awaits officials at every other level of government, too. And casual violence against immigrants, gays, and progressives may escalate as the Tea Party brownshirts become bolder, confident that at least some authorities will either back them up or look the other way.

In this scenario, the fail-safe point -- the point beyond which no country has ever turned back from the full fascist nightmare -- may well be behind us when we wake up on November 3. From there, the rest will play out in agonizing slow motion; and the character of the rest of this decade will hinge almost entirely on whether the corporatists, the militarists, or the theocrats ultimately get the upper hand in the emerging regime.

Of all the ways of organizing banking, the worst is the one we have today — Mervyn King, 25 October 2010

So are we rooting for the corporatists, the militarists or the theocrats?

I'd say the corporatists. The militarists will be a disaster in so many new and creative ways, and I'm not confident that the American theocrats remain in possession of sufficient sanity to not start a nuclear war.

Perhaps we should try to promote an alliance with some of the non-financial corporatists and the more rational of the libertarians and paleo-cons to take down the financial sector by attacking its exposed, fraudulent core where ever possible until it implodes. They suffer from parasitism also.

What evidence is there that these three, (which are not newcomers to America's power structure) are mutually aggressive? Don't the corporates - already pretty much top of the barrel - do well out of non-aggression toward the other two?

Setting aside the Koch crazies for a moment, what corporate elements would feel the need to harness the loopy fascist tendencies of the Tea Bags?

Point not to be forgotten - it was the Hitler option taken by the industrial bourgeoisie that brought the Nazis to power in Germany. But those corporates had seen the near-success of revolution in postwar Germany and the success of revolution in Russia with the resulting Bolshevik threat from the East, and they had a powerful Communist Party fighting for working-class allegiance at home. American corporates are not in that situation.

So you're basically saying that the corporatists are in control in an alliance with the militarists, which 1) ensures that the fundies will not get their hands on the big red button (but may be allowed to wreck the USA internally) and 2) ensures that the militarists will only be able to exercise their destructive tendencies on countries and people that can't fight back.

I guess that's not too bad for everybody who isn't in the US or one of the places it decides to exercise its militarism on.

Well, the military-industrial complex is already an old concept, and Goldwater was a particularly important milestone in the culture wars (though they haven't always been called that). As for the military attacking countries that can't fight back, that has always been at least the intention (though there might turn out to be surprises à la Vietnam or Afghanistan...).

To get back to these elections, I think they're being overhyped as a watershed. America isn't profoundly changing, imo.

Nah, the full fascist option means serious domestic unrest and default. The corporatist wing may want their cheap labour intimidated, but they don't want them terrified and pissed off to the extent that they're either running back home or rioting. They also don't want their gay friends and relatives getting the shit beaten out of them. Verbal gay bashing is one thing; it's a bone that you can throw to the theocrats the physical reality is another.

And there is no way of avoiding either default or a complete loss of support from the 60plus crowd on the full get rid of all capital gains and flat income tax policy. Note how even the most enthusiastic entitlement reform crowd wants to do it slowly, with people fifty five or older grandfathered in. That means no savings until the mid twenties. The Repubs also want to increase the defense budget. Add those up and there is no way they can get fed spending down as a percentage of GDP, even if they slash other stuff to the bone.

Yes, but if you live in la-la land none of those things are mutually exclusive.

You can cut government spending and increase NASA's budget and Medicare support. You can have a strong military by fighting many wars abroad which bleed dry the military. You can be pro-small-business by bailing out banks that suck the lifeblood out of small businesses.

You can be a vegan cannibal with a PhD in derp running a major corporation.

To the Right, anything is possible, because they're individualist go-getters who don't believe in 'no'.

There's a whole industry devoted to working up the crazies and unleashing them in the general direction of their handlers' enemies. Oh, sure, on occasion they go out of control, and there's always a lot of collateral damage. But if push comes to shove, Goldman, Bechtel, Lockheed and General Electric won't let the teabaggers fuck up their sweetheart deal with the US taxpayer.

Now, the classic brownshirts had much the same problem, but unlike the Teabaggers, they could actually organise well enough to throw a drinking party in a distillery. And unlike the Teabaggers, they were mostly young men (or veterans of a real shooting war), not decrepit 50+ year old chickenhawks.

And as another comment pointed out, the German elites had an honest to god large radical authoritarian left movement to worry about. Then there was the context of a horrific economic downturn which created a huge reservoir of support for radicalism. Furthermore, they were opposed to democracy on a deep ideological level, and a majority of the German population was voting for parties which explicitly ran on a platform which denounced democracy as immoral and evil (KPD, NSDAP, DNVP). Finally, it really didn't work out so well for the German elites. Two of the four pillars of the elite (officer corps and landed aristocracy) were pretty much wiped out a dozen years later. One other was badly mauled (the business elites). Only the senior civil service escaped without serious damage.

There is also zero chance of baggers seizing power through local, physical means - the ratio of military power to potential organized public power is orders of magnitude larger today than it was, say, during the French revolution.

Then the police and military would be using the baggers for their own ends. My claim is that the baggers don't represent an internally generated threat to power - not that they aren't dangerous or that this country isn't trending bad direction.

To restate how I interpret what Jake was saying in the comment I originally replied to, the baggers are in a smaller narrative box and are less emotionally self-aware than their handlers - which is arguably the definition of a master/slave relationship.

Whichever side the air force backs will win the conventional phase. After that, probably purges a la Chile. Hopefully the people crewing the strategic nuclear arsenal will render the warheads inoperable in the event of a civil war.

There are enough references back to the Civil War in this thread for us to say, not fragmenting, but fragmented.

It can all hang together (still, for now) thanks to overriding myths backed by economic dominance and the access to resources that it gives. When that runs out, I would not like to be in America. Not that it'll be a picnic anywhere else.

I should have specified "when oil goes and stays above $200/bl, but I didn't want to add that as another comment. And one immediate concern of mine is the impact on agriculture in the USA, which relies heavily on fossil fuel derived fertilizer and petroleum derived fuel for agricultural production and distribution. And it is not just the impact on the farmers, but the fact that so much US agriculture has come to revolve around business arrangements with agricultural corporations such as Archer-Daniels-Midland. Should their margins so deteriorate that they enter bankruptcy I do not know how gracefully the system could degrade.

What percentage of the retail food prices do the fossil fuel prices represent? How much is oil itself? I have no idea, but it's really the most important number for figuring out how significant an increase in the oil price will be on food prices.

Regarding economic performance, even during the first two years of organic transition, average production costs in the conventional corn-soybean rotation were found to be approximately $50/ac higher than the average organic rotation costs.

Interestingly:

Typical of transitioning organic fields, organic corn yields were less than conventional during the first two years of the LTAR experiment. By the third year organic and conventional corn yields were about equal. In the fourth year organic corn yields averaged across all rotations was 130 bushels per acre and greater than the conventional corn yield of 112 bushels per acre in the corn-soybean rotation. Similarly organic and conventional soybean yields were similar in the years of transition and by the fourth year, the organic soybean yield of 45 bu/ac exceeded the conventional yield of 40 bu/ac. Over 12 years of the experiment, the average conventional corn yield has been 171 bu/ac and 163 bu/ac for organic. The 12 year average for conventional and organic soybeans is an identical 47 bu/ac. If the transition period is eliminated from the averages, the conventional and organic yields are statistically identical at 172 bu/ac for conventional corn and 170 bu/ac for organic corn and 47 bu/ac for organic and conventional soybeans despite the consistently underperforming fourth organic rotation.

Focusing on the 12 year "long term" it's possible to state:

Petro-chemical inputs cost $50/acre

The average farmer is pissing that money away. It doesn't do anything.

Bringing-up the intriguing notion the increase in yield from 54 bushels/acre (1960) to 162 bushels/acre (2009) comes from improved seed, farming practices, or both rather than petro-chemicals. This makes it possible to claim it's possible to predict a fall in food prices should petro-chemical inputs be eliminated.

Counter-intuitive, huh?

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

RW people are very, very, good at letting views being downloaded into their heads.

When you care only about whether something 'sounds right' without checking whether it agrees with your lying eyes or is consistent with other things you've had downloaded in the past, anything is possible. Such as lower taxes and better services with a balanced budget.

Of all the ways of organizing banking, the worst is the one we have today — Mervyn King, 25 October 2010

Establish a data environment where your message is maximized both in initial dissemination and feedback loops and your opponents message is minimized and ridiculed, without giving them an opportunity to respond, and you'll win most of the people, most of the time.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Diesel, drying, and other oil-as-fuel costs are so variable as to be impossible to put on a straight-line graph. Those are usually dealt with as an accounting cost rather than a yield analysis.

I agree the overall situation can be deemed "good news."

Countering the good news is the discussion, elsewhere, regarding high-production seed availability. It's possible those seeds will not be planted and during the early years of a transition the local farmer will have to make do with 'carry-over' which doesn't get the yield.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

so much US agriculture has come to revolve around business arrangements with agricultural corporations such as Archer-Daniels-Midland. Should their margins so deteriorate that they enter bankruptcy I do not know how gracefully the system could degrade.

The telecommunications revolution over the past 10 years allows purchasers and elevator operators (amalgamaters and sellers) to route-around middlemen such as ADM with a minimum of effort.

The hairy thing will be getting credit to the farmers so they can afford to buy seeds & etc. needed to put a crop in the ground. I've been out of the loop on that end for so long I can't be intelligent on the subject.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

But producing each year's stock for next year's use all the same depends on farmers - paid and technically managed by the seed-cos.

It wouldn't take long for the system to collapse if the seedsmen went bust. Far too little surface is sown today with simple varieties from which seeds can be kept for sowing the next year, for things to work out easily and quickly. The system is top-heavy and fragile.

20 years ago, in Iowa, there were still small scale local producers of open pollinated corn. Downside: these cultivars produced 20% less in-the-harvester yield. Upside: they produced 15% more in-the-bank-account.

The last I heard, 12 years ago, the majors were buying these companies and closing them. In theory, it would take one season to bring them back into operation. In practice, ?

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Small seed outfits here just get locusted. And no one does anything but hybrid corn.

But corn (maize) isn't essential to human survival. Today's massive overproduction (not counting sweet corn) is mostly an agro-industry input: ethanol, starch, corn syrup, and animal feed. We can do without the first three and without a lot of the fourth - we eat too much meat as it is, and corn-based feedstuffs follow the industrial route into lousy intensive meat production, especially but not exclusively of chicken and pork.

Live in Iowa for a decade and 70% of the US diet comes directly or indirectly from corn (maize) making me slightly obsessive about the little yellow kernels. asdf is the Go-To person for info on US wheat.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

The tendency is that way in Europe, even if some of the big outfits are cooperatives (they are too in the States). And (what follows is anecdote and therefore not the singular of you-know-what) I know for a fact that the smart young guys working for (one of) these structures get ahead thanks to the money they make speculating on futures. Hence imo increased fragility of said structure(s).

Matthews began the interview where he left off two years ago when she told him that she wanted members of Congress investigated for being "anti-American."

"Will you use the subpoena power, which you will have as majority, if you claim the majority of the Congress -- it looks like you will -- will you use subpoena powers to do what you said on my show you'd do -- investigate the Democratic members of Congress for un-American activities?" Matthews asked.

In a television appearance that outraged Democrats are already describing as Joseph McCarthy politics, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann claimed on Friday that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle held anti-American views and couldn't be trusted in the White House. She even called for the major newspapers of the country to investigate other members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America."

Of all the ways of organizing banking, the worst is the one we have today — Mervyn King, 25 October 2010

I can think of several other ways to describe the overlapping consensus. None of them add value to the discussion, though, except as an exposition on the variability of expletives in the English language.

You said it best: Incompetent fuckwit ideologues - and doubly so, since their ideological attachment seems to be the process rather than to the policy.

Voters think the economy's a wreck...but who's to blame? Thirty-five percent of voters in early exit polls pin the blame on Wall Street. The next name on the list: former President Bush - 29 percent point their fingers in his direction. President Obama follows, at 24 percent.

I don't think progressive Democrats are getting the credit they deserve for the hole Obama and the party are in. My new column for the FT tries to redress the balance.

[S]uppose that the Democratic base had not been sulking. Suppose it saw, for example, that persisting with a historic healthcare reform was politically challenging in the middle of an economic crash. Suppose it granted that radically overhauling a health system - some 20 per cent of the US economy - that many Americans rather like was a lot to take on. Suppose it was impressed that Mr Obama did it anyway, and was ready to go further.

Supposing those hopelessly implausible things, Mr Obama's midterm strategy could have been different. Sure of the loyalty of the base, he could have addressed himself to the anxious middle, defended his policies as centrist compromises (which they were), and told the country (as he did in 2008) that its concerns were his concerns. In this alternative universe, he would have had his base and at least a shot at bringing the centre back.

So credit please where it is due. The whining utopian left has a very full schedule of despising Republicans and the idiots and scoundrels (a little over half the country) who keep voting for them. Yet it can always find time to attack its own team, cry and complain, and demand to be patted on the head. The left's role in Tuesday's elections should not go unacknowledged.

So, we're already getting the expected punditry: Obama needs to end his leftist policies, which consist of ... well, there weren't any, but he should stop them anyway.

What actually happened, of course, was that Obama failed to do enough to boost the economy, plus totally failing to tap into populist outrage at Wall Street. And now we're in the trap I worried about from the beginning: by failing to do enough when he had political capital, he lost that capital, and now we're stuck.

But he did have help in getting it wrong: at every stage there was a faction of Democrats standing in the way of strong action, demanding that Obama do less, avoid spending money, and so on. In so doing, they shot themselves in the face: half of the Blue Dogs lost their seats.

And what are those who are left demanding? Why, that Obama move to the center.

Despite plunging polls, business complaints about regulatory uncertainty and populist rhetoric, and the stunning loss Ted Kennedy's Senate seat last January, there was no major course correction. To the White House, it was all just a bunch of whining. It was only in September that the administration finally proposed a "second stimulus" of business tax cuts that were too little, too late to change the political or economic dynamic. The economy made a Republican win almost inevitable, but Obamanomics made it a wipeout.

They are all, (300 or so), packing for their trip to India. (Is the Maharishi still around?) This has some over at Zero Hedge paranoid that something was going down in their absence - but that post is no longer up.

Here is why an open-ended QE2 may be a very moot point: Slate reports that Ron Paul, Ben Bernanke's greatest nemesis, will chair the all important monetary policy subcommittee. In other words, Bernanke v Paul theater will soon be a weekly feature. Too bad Alan Grayson will be no longer present.

Ron Paul could do the right thing and hire Alan Grayson as his Sub-Committee counsel, but that would just be icing on the cake. Laissez le bon temps roulez! Ron Paul is going to tie a tin can onto Ben's forked tail. And he is no friend of the TBTFs either.

AS VEGAS -- The Denver Post has made its call on what seems readily apparent: Michael Bennet will win most of the remaining votes in Colorado's U.S. Senate race and keep his seat. In Alaska, the vote for write-in candidates has exceeded the vote for Joe Miller now by a sizable margin, around 13,000 out of 199,701 total votes. What happens now in that state is a long count, with Murkowski presumed by us corrupt bastards in the media as the winner. If Murkowski does win the count, there'll be a determination by Miller's team on whether to challenge the write-in votes that don't exactly say "Lisa Murkowski."

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

And compare that to what punk-ass runaway Democrat Evan Bayh wrote in the New York Times: "We also overreached by focusing on health care rather than job creation during a severe recession...we were too deferential to our most zealous supporters...we must prove to moderates that Democrats can make tough choices." First off, can we stop saying that Obama focused on health care rather than jobs? The fucking stimulus passed (with almost everything that Republicans wanted in it) before work on health care got going. We had to wait to see if the stimulus worked, and it did help with jobs (it just wasn't big enough so it would appease the non-compromising pricks in the GOP). And, second, fuck you, Evan Bayh, who tucked his tail and his $10 million war chest between his legs and scampered away from the Senate like a whipped bitch on a rainy night.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Here, as far as I can see, are the three big top-line differences:1. The 2008 electorate was 74% white, plus 13% black and 9% Latino. The 2010 numbers were 78, 10 and 8. So it was a considerably whiter electorate.2. In 2008, 18-to-29-year-olds made up 18% and those 65-plus made up 16%. Young people actually outvoted old people. This year, the young cohort was down to 11%, and the seniors were up to a whopping 23% of the electorate. That's a 24-point flip.3. The liberal-moderate-conservative numbers in 2008 were 22%, 44% and 34%. Those numbers for yesterday were 20%, 39% and 41%. A big conservative jump, but in all likelihood because liberals didn't vote in big numbers.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Three of Iowa's Supreme Court justices were voted out of office last night, chalking up a victory for the national anti-gay groups that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the race.

With nearly all precincts reporting, the three justices -- David Baker, Michael Streit and Chief Justice Marsha Ternus -- were voted out by an average margin of 55% to 45%.

It's the first time an Iowa Supreme Court justice has been ousted since Iowa instituted its system of appointment and retention in 1962.

Last year, the Iowa Supreme Court's seven justices voted unanimously to legalize same-sex marriage in the state, making them a target of groups like the National Organization for Marriage, the American Family Association and the Family Research Council, who declared the ruling a case of gross judicial activism and usurpation of power.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Good post up at the Orange place on what was a truly impressive showing by Harry Reid. Angle won the primary, and Reid spent months tearing her face off and cranking the base. He actually outperformed Obama's 2008 showing with Latinos(!!).

If he ran the Senate half as well as he campaigned, last night would've been a very different story.

Yes and no. In fairness, he has full control over the operation and message in the campaign. Not so much in the Senate, and most of the job of the Senate Majority Leader is never seen by us. I'm inclined to cut Reid more slack than I am the Obama, because the fact is Reid's got a shitty hand to play in the endless game of herding cats that is the Democratic Caucus, whereas the White House has nothing to lose by pushing hard.

That said, clearly Reid has been a patsy on many occasions by not making the GOP take a stand and actually vote.

He's one of the good guys. He's just not a very effective leader.

The sad thing in all of this is that the one person who displayed some level of competence -- Pelosi, who's spent the last two years trying to fix things that Obama and Reid have fucked up -- is the one who got hit hardest.

Don't know if there was any discussion anywhere about this race, but windpower pulled out a squeaker in the US House.

In California district 11, former colleague of mine and windpower engineer Jerry McNerney defeated an aptly named rethug, Harmer.

Windpower 82,124
Harmer 82,003

So Jerry wins his 2nd term (3rd??), after first defeating one of the worst environmental thugs with key committee chairs in the Bush Haus period. Impressive for a red district. from orange

In a long-time Republican-leaning district, as an incumbent congress person in an anti-incumbent wave of idiocy across the country - against all these political and cultural obstacles and more, McNerney seems to have pulled off a win against an opponent he was trailing less that three weeks ago by - get this - citing his opponents raving, anti-socialism, anti-public education values.
...
121 votes. Yow. So, like, every vote counted.

In other words, the very type attacks that have been whipping right-wing furor for the past several years, the kind of rhetoric that has fueled the rise of Sarah Palin and has been keeping Rush on the air for decades, that rhetoric caused enough voters in a conservative district to stick with the democratic, liberal incumbent. Cries of "The Socialists Are Coming!!!" was deemed too nutty, or too dangerous, for a conservative district.

Of course, Jerry McNerney himself had to use it in an ad he put on the air in the final weeks. He had to actively campaign with it, not just hope enough people would notice. He couldn't be afraid to bring it up and attack his opponent with it. Every Democratic candidate still standing, and any future hopefuls, should take note. The lunatic, anti-socialist, right-wing rhetoric is a liability, even in a district that should have gone red.

We all owe McNerney a lot, for, as you recall, he unseated Richard Pombo back in '06, one of the most dangerous anti-environmentalist representatives and Tom Delay lap-dogs leftover in the Bush administration. The fact that McNerney's kept his seat for a third term - in this election - should tell us that we should keep an eye on him.

Marc Ambinder, author of the linked article, has not particularly distinguished himself:

Privately, White House officials hope that Republicans immediately adopt a celebratory, no-compromise, "we're back!" posture, and hope that they don't take the advice of Sen. Mitch McConnell, who will call the election a mere "course correction."